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Download innoBright’s free tech preview of Altus 1.0

New startup innoBright has released a free tech preview of Altus: an intriguing new system for denoising images generated in a range of common renderers, including Arnold, V-Ray, Corona and Redshift.

Generate quick, noisy renders, then clean them up in post
The software works on similar principles to the Denoise option introduced in RenderMan 20 earlier this year: in this case, automatically removing noise from raytraced images generated using Monte Carlo methods.

Users generate two fast, noisy source images in their chosen renderer, then run Altus as a post-process to create a single clean image.

According to innoBright, this combined rendering and post-processing workflow is between two and nine times faster than simply allowing the image to resolve to the same point in the host render engine.

The software can handle depth of field and motion blur, and supports both still renders and animations.

Available as a standalone tool or a Maya plugin
Altus comes as either a standalone, which works with most Monte Carlo renderers, but requires you to generate the AOVs it needs yourself; or as a Maya plugin, which generates the AOVs automatically.

Chaos Group’s Emanuele ‘Lele’ Lecchi has also written a work-in-progress script that automates the process in 3ds Max and V-Ray.

According to innoBright’s FAQs, Altus works with both CPU and GPU-based renderers, can run in batch/headless mode, and has a built-in superviser for distributed rendering.

In future, the software will support “major render management software such as Deadline and Tractor”.

Pricing and availability
Altus 1.0 standalone is available for 64-bit Windows and Linux. It’s OpenCL-based, so to run it, you’ll need the OpenCL run-time libraries installed. The Maya plugin is available in Arnold or V-Ray versions.

According to the accompanying Readme file, the software runs in watermarked evaluation mode until you buy a commercial licence, although there seems to be no way to do that on the innoBright website just yet.